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These
Are a Few of My Favorite Quotes
On Writing (and Life).
. . .
Try to be mindful,
and let things take their natural course.
Then your mind will become still
in any surroundings
like a clear forest pool.
All kinds of wonderful, rare animals
will come to drink at the pool,
and you will clearly see the nature of all things.
You'll see many strange
and wonderful things come and go,
but you will be still.
-Achaan Chah
Nothing bad ever happens to a writer. It's all material.
-Garrison Keillor
I write every day, even when my imagination is paper thin.
-Joyce Carol Oates
Natalie Goldberg quotes
You are free to write the worst junk in the universe.
-from Wild Mind
Anything you do deeply is very lonely. . . . But do not let it toss
[you] away. It is just loneliness.
-Katagiri Roshi
from Wild Mind
We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition. No one
is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of
the heart.
- Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
from Writing Down the Bones
Quotes by Brenda Ueland from If You Want to Write
Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.
Women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing.
Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write.
Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary.
Factoid
Two of my favorite books
of all time are Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy and Running
Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound by Judith Katz. Piercy researched
Soldiers for seven years. It took Katz ten years to write Running
Fiercely -- her first novel, it was published after she turned
40. Remember this when you think you are moving too slowly.
Quotes by Deena Metzger from Writing for Your Life
The inner world is always, by its nature, every moment, for one's entire
life, new territory.
The imagination, like any unexplored territory, will, each time, turn
out to be both strange and familiar. And we go into it, each time, as
if we have never been there before and also as if we are coming home.
To write is, above all else, to construct a self. Journal entries and
life histories, as well as fictions, poems, and plays, are variations
on the most fundamental human need to know oneself deeply and in relationship
to the world.
A poem is a penetration into the essence of something. It begins in
a moment, is the thing itself as well as the surrounding space. A poem
is in the spaces between the words.
I don't think I would have become a writer if I hadn't imagined myself
as one.
Quotes by Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop
is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that
needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to
share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little.
One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says
to himself nicely, "It's not like you don't have a choice, because
you do -- you can either type or you can kill yourself."
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.
In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write
really, really shitty first drafts.
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor. It is the main obstacle
between you and a shitty first draft. Besides, perfectionism will ruin
your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force
(these are words we are allowed to use in California).
If you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with
jealousy, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen
for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know -- people
who are, in other words, not you.
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